Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print control apparatus, a printing apparatus, and a data processing method, and particularly to, for example, a print control apparatus that controls printing of an inkjet printhead for executing printing by reciprocally scanning while discharging ink onto a print medium, a printing apparatus, and a data processing method.
Description of the Related Art
A conventional inkjet printing apparatus (for example, a printer or the like) receives multi-valued image data from a host PC, performs processing of converting the image data into print data printable by the printer, and then prints an image on a print medium (for example, a paper sheet, a photographic paper sheet, a postcard, or the like). The printable print data is data indicating an amount of ink to be discharged onto a print medium, and is, for example, data used for printing using four color inks of C (cyan), M (magenta), Y (yellow), and K (black). Furthermore, depending on the apparatus, the print data may be data used for printing using 12 color inks including PC, PM, R, G, B, MB, Gray, and PG in addition to the above colors.
Some of printers for high-end users use 12 color inks for high-image-quality printing, and include an image data processing unit capable of generating print data of 12 colors. Since it is impossible to execute printing before data processing of the 12 colors finishes, it is necessary to increase the data processing speed to increase the print speed. As a method of increasing the speed of the image data processing unit, an ASIC that can implement a custom specification by hardware can be used although a long development period is required.
On the other hand, specifications for respective products have diversified, and products for executing printing using various numbers of inks have appeared on the market. Thus, if an ASIC is developed for the specifications of each product, it becomes difficult to commercially introduce each product timely, and enormous development resources are required.
To solve the above problems, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2012-248996 has proposed a technique of building a system that can flexibly comply with the specifications of each product by arranging a plurality of identical ASICs. More specifically, if image data as a target to be processed cannot be processed by one ASIC, processing of transferring some of the image data to another ASIC to be processed, receiving the image data having undergone data processing, composing the received image data, and then transferring the thus obtained data to an engine driving unit is performed.
In an apparatus for executing printing by mounting a printhead on a carriage and reciprocally scanning the carriage, to increase the print speed, a required speed for one scan is determined in a configuration in which a plurality of identical ASICs are used to execute data processing, as described above. The scale and development period of each ASIC are determined by implementing image data processing by ASICs to achieve a speed for one scan for each of a product that processes a small image data amount and a product that processes a large image data amount.
A recent inkjet printing apparatus has coped with its increased size and increased number of color inks. Thus, the data processing unit for generating print data is also expected to perform data processing at a higher speed regardless of the number of ink colors.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2012-248996, however, has proposed a configuration in which if a processing size (for example, a paper size) is large, input image data is distributed and identical ASICs execute distributed processing for respective print areas. Therefore, this configuration may not be optimum in a case where distributed processing that can flexibly cope with the number of ink colors is performed. In the configuration proposed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2012-248996, distributed processing results are put together in one ASIC. Consequently, since data transfer is often performed between the ASICs at a high speed, it is necessary to include high-speed interfaces, thereby increasing the scales of the ASICs. This is not an optimized configuration in terms of suppression of the development cost of ASICs.
On the other hand, a configuration of performing the distributed processing of image data for respective ink color components by a plurality of ASICs is desirable in terms of load distribution of data processing. A configuration capable of controlling the processed data in the same ASIC with the engine side is desirable to suppress exchange of data between the ASICs as much as possible.